I have had an HP dv6 (circa 2009) dual-booting Win 7 and Win 8 for some time now. If I choose Win 7, I get my HP splash screen again. I'm not sure if this is a reboot, but it's only a minor annoyance and doesn't really hurt my experience.

Do you have a brightness button on any of your laptop's function keys? I have a laptop that goes dark when booting Ubuntu and I have to increase the brightness manually to see the rest of the boot process. Everything is normal once I get to the log-in screen, though.